#that'll work for sure

[tokyo-daaaamn-ji-gang]

Hanma the first time after he got shot.

No one can tell if he's joking or serious, Kisaki contemplates letting him bleed out after he said that.

[vaggieslefteye]

VOX, Media Overlord | 1x02 - Radio Killed The Video Star

"[He's] up in his tower waiting for a flat-faced prince to calm him down."

[zarla-s]

I updated the GT Ghost Template! Ghosts are little desktop doodads I post about too much, I made a video about what they are here. Anyway, my template/site is meant to help you make your own ghost! Here are the changes. They're mostly coding changes so I don't have any interesting pictures to show of them sadly, unless you want pictures of just... text.

Updated yaya.dll to Tc571-5, meaning you can use ": all" on stuff now, and subsequently used that to clean up some of the menus. Write-up on ": all" on the walkthrough site still to come.

OnFirstBoot no longer asks the user's name/pronouns, I left the code in so you can add it in yourself if you want but by default it's not there. This will hopefully simplify the whole process down for a new developer.

Setting pronouns and your birthday are commented out in the config menu by default, you can uncomment them and fill in the dialogue for each function as you want. This will also hopefully simplify things down. Added some cute ascii banners too to help indicate the sections in the file as a result. :3

Simplified OnBoot and OnClose a ton by making the various time/day checks optional. The code's still there, you just have uncomment it and add it back in where you want. But this should make OnBoot and OnClose much less intimidating.

Similarly cut down the time/day if checks in aitalk.dic, they're still there but there's only one of each as an example of how to do one.

Made the screen boundary check opt-in. If you want to turn that feature on you'll have to uncomment a few things. I've heard more complaints about that feature than enjoyment so I figured it's better to leave it off.

Made the extra time check dialogue optional. THEY WON'T ANNOUNCE THE TOP OF THE HOUR BY DEFAULT ANYMORE. IT'S THE END OF AN ERA.

Made adding titles to the user's name like Lady or Master optional, so you can comment it in if you want but it's not enabled by default.

Rewrote and reorganized some parts of etc.dic, mostly emphasizing that it's not super important in the big scheme of things so people won't get stuck filling it out as much. Hopefully.

I know ghost updates aren't as flashy as art and fic but I spent a few hours doing all this and that deserves a post too! Trying to break some mental habits...

[patreon]

[princyvish]

WOE KOBYLU MARRIAGE BE UPON YE!! I'm normal about them

They would get married to this song trust

[tj-crochets]

So it turns out there's a big craft guild organization thing only a few hours from where I live (I saw an ad for their craft fair), and I got like half my holiday shopping done on their website, and the box arrived today! The thing I was most excited to see in person is fragile, though, and it's really well wrapped in bubble wrap and I don't want it to break when I mail it to the friend it's for, so I am not unwrapping it, but oh man the temptation is there lol I also got myself a little metal bug made of a bottle cap and some wire. It lives on my little corkboard where I put postcards and thank you cards now

[honestsycrets]

This user has been stealing my work, Mio, on wattpad. Does anyone familiar with Wattpad know how I might go about getting it removed? Thank you to the user who called my attention to this. I really do hate it when this is done.

[keeps-ache]

✦ devotion

[waitineedaname]

the funny thing about tianlang-jun is that mxtx writes terrible fathers and incredible uncles, and tianlang-jun manages to be both

[kaiowut99]

TFSP Translation Progress Update: Shark Nasch's Lines

get it Nasch's Lines/Nazca Lines er anyway

ding Shark's all done! After finishing up Yuma's last two stories (I'd done his first two as I was prepping my announcement video for this whole thing), I just wrapped up re-translating Shark's story events in TFSP, and it's kinda neat how Yuma's gets you to this bit from his POV while Shark's story events get you here from his POV after he comes to terms with his past memories (so the "it's been ages" line was in both stories, just a little differently lol; these are from his last event). And while I wish they'd coded in Nasch (and the other Barians' Barian forms) so he could turn into him in these bits, to the game's credit, Shark's sprite early into his story has him without his Barian necklace, but he gets it once he starts accepting that he's Nasch.

I've already worked on Shark's in-duel dialogue from my work on that video, so I'll be giving those a once-over next and then working fresh on his bio, which I thought I'd already done. That'll then do it for this go-around of TFSP work as I jump back into GX and finalize my subs for episodes 122 and 123; I'll likely put up a little video of some of Shark's story translation and in-duel lines once done, so stay tuned!

[anonyanonymouse]

Imagine briar country wins they war and the humans offer KoD as a tribute as part of a piece treaty and Maleanor offers him to Lillia as a way of thanking him for his services. So now Lillia has this pretty little pet, what will he do? Get that man pregnant, obviously, and so KoD gives birth to Silver

Omg... I'm imagining this happening if Briar Country takes action way faster than they did in canon. When there were only a couple small towns worth of humans in the entire country, if they didn't hesitate when they realized humans were taking their resources, and they stamped them out right then

I don't think KoD would have been born at that time, so maybe a select few were saved for breeding. The docile ones, still strong enough to survive briar country's powerful magic in day to day life... They'd all have that sweet demeanor that we know Silver and KoD for (and that I'd imagine Sebby's dad has as well) it's cute <3 by the time 400 years roll by, they'd all be properly bred into adoring little dogs for the fae awe

But anyway, this is about Lilia.. Meleanor giving him a human pet is so silly to me LOL trying to drag her husband off that little bat fae for herself, sorry Lilia, here's a consolation pet though have fun. And Lilia doesn't even want him...

Thinking about KoD following Lilia around, asking him if he needs anything, bringing him drinks and snacks, cleaning his messes. Lilia will ignore him and tell him to go manage the garden if he's so bored.. Uuuu and he sleeps at the foot of Lilia's bed..... <3

(nsfw under cut)

I think it's reasonable to assume that KoD wouldn't know even the first thing about sex, but he WOULD have a sex drive like crazy (hormonal teen...) whether Lilia reciprocates it or not, he's the only one KoD has there to think about and pine for. He wants to be good like he was trained to be from the moment he was old enough to walk, but he can't help himself if he grinds against him a little or gets touchy at night. Lilia scolds him for it every time, but he doesn't know what he's doing, it just feels good!!

Lilia snapping at some point and teaching him properly what his body wants is good 🤤 KoD isn't expecting it to be so hands on and dirty, he tries to stop Lilia over and over because he shouldn't be dirtying his hands with his own pet's wet fluids, but the words never quite come out right because he gets overwhelmed!! Lilia is really good with his tongue, poor little dawn...

[hellbeast-go-walkies]

Stefon: I just don't know what else I can do. I flirt with Seth all the time, we even took a trip together, and I think he likes me back, but we're still not together.

Anderson Cooper: Listen to me. Fake wedding.

[ninoochat]

[seokmattchuus]

When Matthew tells you he's been a bit stressed with debut preparations, you help him get his mind off of things. With some handcuffs and a torturous, never-ending hand job.

[presiding]

I'm not a new follower and I've been here long enough but i do have a relatively bad memory

So I've wanted to ask, what's your opinion on "Dishonored: death of the outsider"?

Right now I'm replaying Dishonored games not in the release order, i already finished DH2 and started Daud dlcs. Maybe I'll go for vanilla DH later

But thoughts about going through death of the outsider again makes me feel something that i can't explain... 😬

It has some interesting ideas but antagonists are underused. Locations repeat a lot. And Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

I'm genuinely debating if i should revisit *this* one or pretend that DH2 is the last game. I know that some people love DOTO but i can't find strength in me

love to chat about death of the outsider, ty for the ask!

i feel your pain. it's the one game i struggle to revisit. but! i was thinking about your points and how DotO has the feel of budget cuts.

it's been about a year since my last DotO post - so, essay time -

a measured response to common DotO criticisms

(the thousand bugs of dishonored 2 I had borne as I best could, but when doto ventured upon sidelining billie and retconning daud's arc I vowed revenge*

*can't resist a cask of amontillado joke

criticism is easy and creation is hard, so, if this isn't the type of response you wanted, you can read my other DotO posts:

how i'd write death of the outsider

that post i did after trying to play doto a third time and couldn't make it past the opening scene (you might like my tags on this re: your comment "makes me feel something i can't explain")

billie lurk as a nonprotagonist & misogynoir (more on this below...)

gonna leapfrog off your comments cause I agree!

antagonists are underused/locations repeat a lot.

who is steering the boat?

let's start up at the top; everything stems from there.

DotO was caught up in ownership/transition issues. here's an article about harvey smith and raphael colantanio at that time. if you didnt know, colantonio is the main founder of arkane (semi-related but just for fun look his appearance up then go through arkane's protags and tell me what you notice...).

quote from harvey smith re: DotO -

“Then, just as I move back, [Colantonio is] announcing that he’s leaving. Going forward, I’ll focus more and more on the Austin studio and what we’re going to do there. Death of the Outsider is my wrapping up with the guys in Lyon – the first half of that we planned together while I was living there, but the second half was worked on while I was living in Austin. I’ve been communicating with them through video conferences and stuff, so they carry a lot of the load of the second half of it.”

so the founder jumped ship and the co-creative director has to step away from his usual position (over to sinking ship Austin). meanwhile, DotO is still in development. i'm a big believer in people making art, and not companies (even in this article Smith acknowledges much of their "secret sauce" can be traceable to specific devs but i digress)

$$$ kaching - some speculation

on the note of founders - past this point in arkane's history (ie. the main founder stepping back), arkane would have been being primed for sale. this translates to high scrutiny on project expenditure (such as hiring cheaper early career staff, hiring less workers, denying your best staff raises causing them to leave and hiring cheaper workers in their place, etc) to make the company's EBITDA look more appealing to buyers (briefly, its the piece of paper that proves you're profitable). based on speculative timelines, from a purely $ perspective within the first year of dh2 being released is when you'd be looking to slim down your capitalised expenditure (aka: cutting staff while the revenue is at a peak to make number go brr and make your company look like a better investment) because to maximise the profit of a company's sale, you really have a great track record for a few years.

this is purely speculation based on timelines. companies are very careful to hide when they're doing this, ideally they want ~3 years of a great track record (and staff that will keep working their hardest).

big goals and no money

DotO was meant to be a two-part DLC like the Dh1 DLCs, so shout out to what could have been made if their original pitch had worked.

On locations & antagonists & budget - this dev's site discusses the Conservatory level in game AND specifies it was budget constraints being the reason for cutting off traversable area from that mission. Great link for comparing the original level & the DotO version, especially re: your point about reused assets/levels.

We could pick other examples here but this post is already long so -

Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

i would forgive this game anything if there was any good billie storywriting.

:')

its never just the writers

after revisiting articles to fact-check for this essay, i've seen a lot of articles blaming writers by name (you didn't do this anon which i love <3)

games are made by teams, and decision making is generally done top-down, so blaming individual contributors is shit. 1) writer's pay isn't good enough to cop this kind of abuse. 2) it's rarely in their control - you can write a beautiful scene only to have that level cut due to costs (etc), and then you need to work out how to make the story make sense. ideation & decision-making are separate and i guess 'this idea was [X]'s' should not be mistaken for 'this is the fault of [X]'s.'

on hiring fans (& imm-sim writing strategies)

the new writers [...] already had an idea of the world, as they’d seen it from the outside, as fans. “These are all people that knew this world we had created and they took it as canonical, as the gospel. Whereas, for us, it was bits and pieces we’d made up along the way.”

as someone who used to hire writers, and i promise this isn't in bad faith: don't hire fans unless your priority is cost then, sure, fans are likely to put in overtime (and not be in a position in their career where they can ask for higher remuneration - they'll pay the passion tax to be involved).

writers (esp new career writers) have to be open to receiving feedback assuming healthy/functional processes, and being a fan makes that harder because you care more. and, as a fan, you know what loose ends exist and that's where you'll naturally jump to, even though writers should start with target audience and branding, and build from there. if i expand on this i'll get offtopic so let's keep going!

DotO feels lifeless because it doesn't add anything to the DH universe, it only takes away by closing storylines without the satisfaction of closure. sure, stuff was added - the cult subplot, locations, some NPCs/enemies, etc. but they feel like part of the objectives, not part of the dishonored universe. you can feel the decision-making process when you play: there's a feeling that the priority was to finish the assets required for missions, instead of writing a story that feels immersive.

compared to standard videogame writing, where you can generally get away with "everything you touch and read relates to your objectives as the protagonist", as an imm-sim writer, you need to focus on:

how does this text build the universe so that the player feels like they're only seeing a small part of the world?

of course - this is difficult with budget/time concerns. i've said it before but this is part of why we rarely have games as rich as dishonored 1 & 2, because imm-sim design philosophy flies against the current videogame industry trends of microtransactions & cheap-to-make addictive mobile games. given a tight budget you focus on the high level story, but player immersion is a function of details.

most likely, dh2 was the end of an era. typing that out makes me sad.

what did the devs say about writing billie

*breathes deeply*

the death of the outsider protag was originally pitched as being about a regular human, someone not related to emily and corvo but instead an overseer or a brigmore witch. daud was also pitched.

this could have worked! really cool to have a nobody, or a heretic, or an overseer, be involved with the death of a god. and i've mentioned before that storywise DotO's protag could have been anyone (i think i made a joke about wyman? hah) and wouldn't change the story much, bar some daud bits.

quote from the same article:

eventually Arkane settled on Billie Lurk, Emily's companion from Dishonored 2. [...] Bakaba tells me that because Billie had already received her redemption arc in Dishonored 2, Death Of The Outsider's story could be about something more than that.

welp.

so there's two things here - a redemption arc claim, and DotO's actual story.

in addition to not being the first pick, the view was that billie's story was over. i question the 'redemption arc' claim - sure, billie helps the protag in dh2 but after her confession, if you tell her she's changed, she brushes it off and you part awkwardly without forgiving her... does that count? if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? if a character redeems themselves but the story never tells you, are they redeemed?

billie's role in dh2 isn't really that different to the dlcs, where she follows you around being Mr Exposition while withholding a LOT of information that could have actually helped the protag. given DotO's plot, going after the killer who shaped her doesn't scream 'reformed' either. ludonarratively speaking, the lack of chaos implies billie never changed from being a callous killer - which i'm not against, it would have been a cool story.

and! contrast this with daud who already had his redemption arc!

When first conceptualising Death Of The Outsider in around 2014, Smith and Duval knew they wanted two things: Billie Lurk being used to get to The Outsider himself, and closure for Dishonored villain (and later ally) Daud.

in the two DLCs, as we know, he comes to realise his actions sucked, and as the player you actively make things right (related: my post about ludonarrative dissonance in dh2). so if billie had "already received her redemption arc", why was this another daud story?

imo this isn't a budget issue but a misogynoir issue. "we want this story to be not about the protagonist so any random NPC will do, how about we go with billie lurk and get a black woman as a dishonored protag?" this logic, which is what i'm reading of the above two quotes, feels frustratingly tokenistic when she's an established character with a rich background. it's an example of surface level diversity because DotO is not about her by arkane's own admission. it's a similar vibe to the companies who say they have a diverse team but you check their staff page and all the people of colour have 'assistant' in their title and the board is all white, so it's not people of colour who are driving the business. maybe this was entirely by accident but these accidents add up to systematic failure - billie gets her own game but never her own story. it feels like she got assigned the caretaker role for these two guys. great.

for fairness, let's compare to dh2. corvo & emily are relatively hands-off protags in terms of their ongoing thoughts about their surroundings and the lore placement about them specifically is sparse, and this style continues in DotO. the issue is the core narrative: corvo & emily are both the protagonists of their story in the sense that dh2's story reflects their goals ("take back what's yours"), whereas Billie is an established character who has arguably little reason to go along with each mission. worse, the main plotline she's literally forced into going along with. in the opening scene billie gets assaulted and still helps the guy who assaulted her.

fundamentally, DotO's narrative is not about billie but about daud and the outsider, and this article makes clear that was by design.

whats the takeaway

DotO is the weakest entry in the Dishonored series for most people, and blaming budget & a corporate changeover makes me feel... uh well it doesn't really help me tbh but your mileage may vary. it does interest me to think about what we could have had!

for me, my opinion is that if writing billie was a priority (link to my own post where i describe the feeling of playing doto as someone interested in billie) arkane would have made it a priority, even amidst constraints. billie's redemption arc was not resolved imo, and putting her in a game without a chaos system feels like as much a backwards slide for her as daud's plotline to kill the outsider was for his arc.

we absolutely 🤝 on not being in a rush to play the game again.

on the upside. dishonored 2 is a really wonderful game and i love it very much.

[jay-quinox]

Charlie WIP! It's going to be part of a larger comic - beach day for the Hazbin cast! She's not entirely finished yet, given she's sitting on a random pink rectangle 😂 TBC!

[lacnunga]

In the wake of the IA situation, I've seen a lot more posts circulating about using your local library and I just. Sigh